ROMMEL

Two hours ago, Afterimage signed a contract filling (likely) our last open slot for 2026. So it felt like a good time ship our new site and share some reflections. Every so often a creative asks for advice - I wrote this addressed to them. 1. PICKING. It’s obvious that a VC’s job is to be good at picking. But as a creative professional, you should treat picking as a similarly foundational craft. At Afterimage, we view the ceiling of our work as highly limited by the quality of the raw ingredients we’re working with, like a chef might. We, thus, try to be obsessive about attracting the types of people we’d want to work with, repelling the one we wouldn’t, and improving our judgement of what makes a company a good fit for our style and process. It’s easy to get sucked into the "work" itself day to day (the writing, concepting, producing) but when the work's quality is limited by the quality of your collaborators, it's worth being quite aggressive about this. 2. DOGFOOD. I am shocked by how bad the brand and comms are for people who sell brand and comms as a service. How can you look a company in the eye and tell them you’ll help them feel fresh and different if you feel the same as all your peers? 3. IN YOUR WAY. A hugely common misconception (IMO) is that the perfect client is one who will “get out of your way” to let you — the genius — do your brilliant art. While this is certainly better than an actively bad client, I find this worldview be a quite limited (and a bit sad). At Afterimage, our bar for a client is someone can’t help but get IN our way with their feedback and ideas. We seek clients who hold incredibly strong opinions, will share them all with us, and make our work more specific and memorable. When Afterimage was an early idea, a friend suggested we demand “creative control” from startups; even if it were ever viable, that is simply not the spirit through which I view this work. I view every project as a collaboration - we bring our sensibility to it, but it’s like when one artist is featured on another’s. It's fun *because* you get to hear them adapt to the particular beat and style. 4. ANTI CLIENTS. It can be helpful to articulate (loudly) the types of projects that you wouldn’t be interested. Our example: Afterimage probably is not a good fit to work with Clay. We say this on calls all the time. Not because Clay doesn’t do great brand work. They do! That’s the point. They have their machine running and mostly need people to execute at a high-level. Our special sauce is doing more foundational brand work, what we sometimes call “brand expansion through a campaign”, something slightly closer to 0→1 than pure execution. Articulating what work we *wouldn’t* work on, to ourselves and others, helps everyone align on our values and approach. 5. YOUR FLOOR. I believe in caring as much about your floor as much as your ceiling. Funnily enough, I am almost more proud of how good the “worst” Afterimage project is than I am by how good our “best” is. There are simply no projects that we phone in, no projects we do for money that we don’t share publicly (a lot of agencies do this). Often I’ll see a company put out some really beautiful client campaign, I’ll get excited and follow them, and then a week later they share a mindless founder to camera thing. I view our “floor” as a promise we make to anyone who might work with us. You don’t have to worry which version of us you’re getting. 6. DIFFICULT IS SCARCE. There are a bunch of small things I’ve gotten better at this year, but the biggest leap I’ve taken in my process is learning how to identify a gut feeling of “this is gonna be a difficult one…” as a deeply positive creative signal to lean into. When we pitched doing a whole video with stop motion (with no experience in the medium) or pitched doing a video with a cow (where? how?) I knew they’d be difficult to pull off. But almost without fail those difficult ideas are the ones that cut through. The logic, in hindsight, is very simple. Doing difficult things (well) will always be a scarce. “Now more than ever” this is true. As certain things get easier, seek out what remains difficult (eg handmade, in the world). There will always be a market for people willing to do difficult things. I learned this from watching @cyrusduff_ work. I am more optimistic today than I was earlier this year that Afterimage can be a flexible container for the evolving interests of me, Cyrus, and our core group of collaborators. I don't know exactly what that adds up to, but I don't think it's something that exists today. It feels like there should be a company of creative professionals & artists, sitting unapologetically in the tech industry, who are uncompromising in the bar for what they produce. Hope to prove out what this might feel like the rest of this year and in 2027.